We’ve covered the toner/ink cartridges in the past but have now had an email from Wendy Johnson Houghton about the machines themselves:

I have recently purchased a new printer for my personal use.

I now have a printer which sort of works, but not brilliant – and I want to know whether it is recyclable?

If it’s still working – as you say it is, someone else might prefer to take a chance on refilling the existing cartridges or replacing them with cheaper ones – so it might be worth offering it on your local Freecycle group.

Any other suggestions?

(Photo by brokenarts)

We’ve had an email from Peter Hughes asking simply:

How can I recycle memory sticks?

I’m presuming he means USB memory fobs and not the bits of strips of memory used inside computers – but when broken, the latter make fun keyrings for geeks.

I had an idea of incorporating a small USB stick into a necklace – as a pendant – or other jewellery but I intended these to be functional rather than just decorative.

So any suggestions on ways to recycle or reuse them if they’re broken?

(Photo by woodsy)

We’ve had an email from Brian Garrett asking about recycling satellite dishes:

I’ve got one in the garage (after upgrading to the latest version). My neighbors have some on their roofs that are unused.

What is the best way to recycle an unused satellite dish? These are the smaller DirectTV/Dish network dishes – not the big 6′ dishes.

I suspect the number of old dishes floating around is growing steadily as people (in the UK) are encouraged to flip back and forth between cable and satellite depending on the current offer of the moment.

So any suggestions?

(Photo courtesy of my neighbours across the street who have a satellite dish on the side of their house)

Robert Adler, one of the guys that co-invented the remote control, died last week.

I suspect when a piece of remote-controlled equipment dies, people just sling out the remote too but are there any way to reuse them? Let’s assuming getting the equipment fixed isn’t possible or feasible, are there any uses for the now-redundant remote control?

Or are there any places that re-sell them? We lost our tv remote control a few years ago and after searching everywhere, bought a replacement – but the replacement was brand new, when a second-hand one would have sufficed. Then, because life is just like that, we found the original and so now have a spare – is there any way for us to pass it on?

My brother and I got our first proper PC in the mid-1990s.

We could do word processing on it, basic drawing and DTP – lots of serious grown-up stuff that justified it as a (second-hand) purchase to our parents … but we still mostly used it for playing games.

Our favourite game, for a long while, was a pinball game which used the ALT keys to work the flippers. Before long, the worn out ALT keys fell off. So we changed the game’s controls to use the CTRL keys instead. And ditto. And so on, until we rendered our first computer keyboard pretty much useless.

I don’t go in for such abusive gaming these days but as we live on our computers now, (my boyfriend) John and I still end up with broken keyboards from time to time, or just spare ones when one comes free with a new computer or something.

When they’re still in working order, we give them away to friends or family in need, or the local computer recycling place, but any suggestions of what we can do with broken ones, or their parts? Any recycling/upcycling ideas?

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